Executive Committee Decisions 2006

January 1st, 2006 to March 31st, 2006

  • After a call for bids for the CP 2006 summer school, the EC received two bids. The accepted bid was from Kostas Stergiou and Toby Walsh, who will organize the 2006 CP summer school in Samos, Greece, on June 18-23, 2006. As decided by the EC after the 2005 school, general and advanced summer schools will alternate. This school will be an advanced school on global constraints. The school web site is at the URL http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~tw/school.html

  • The travel grant scheme that was announced in Sitges is still on hold. In the meantime, the EC considered, and accepted, the following requests for sponsorship:

    • 1000 euros to the International Workshop on Mathematics of Constraint Satisfaction: Algebra, Logic and Graph Theory, that has been held on March 20-24, at St Anne's College, University of Oxford. The workshop web site, containg all presentation slides, is at the URL http://www.cs.rhul.ac.uk/home/green/mathscsp/
    • 1000 euros to the Annual ERCIM Workshop on Constraint Solving and Constraint Logic Programming (CSCLP 2006) to be held on June 26-28, 2006, at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Caparica, Portugal. Web site: http://centria.di.fct.unl.pt/conferences/csclp06
    • 3000 euros to the 2006 CP summer school (see above for details about the school).
  • CP 2005 had a nice surplus. Many thanks to Pedro, Javier, and Peter for a wonderful organization and program! The EC hopes that this money will be useful to support many interesting CP activities in the future.

  • Frederic Benhamou, the program chair of CP 2006, wanted to know the ACP EC opinion about the possibility of eliminating doctoral program abstracts from the CP proceedings. The AC EC has discussed this issue, and it is in favour of the following:

    • removing the 1-page DP abstracts from the Springer proceedings
    • putting the DP abstracts and/or longer versions in the DP web site and in Corr
    • distributing the DP abstracts to the CP participants by printing a separare booklet, like a workshop proceedings
    • use Corr also for the workshop proceedings However, full responsability for the program and the proceedings of the CP conference remains in the hands of the program chair and the program committee.
  • To encourage discussion on ACP-related matters, the ACP EC has started a Yahoo! discussion group on constraints, where anybody can join or leave at any time, by following the simple instructions at the URL http://groups.yahoo.com/group/constraints/ On March 23, 2006, this discussion group has 145 members.

  • To follow the discussion which took place at the ACP general assembly at CP 2005, the EC is creating a task force on CP applications, that will be led by Barry O'Sullivan. The role if this task force is to identify mechanisms to attract practitioners and industrial people to CP conferences, and in general to strenghten the link between academia and industry in the CP field. People interested in joining this task force should contact Barry.

  • After the 2005 ACP research award, given to Eugene Freuder at CP 2005, there has been an ongoing discussion about an annual versus a two-yearly ACP research award. We will hopefully finalize this discussion soon and post the result on the ACP web site and the CP newsletter. In any case, the receipient of the next award will be chosen by the EC among a set of candidates proposed by the CP community through an open call.

  • The ACP EC will be happy to receive proposals for initiating new activities, or for improving the current ones. Any member of the CP community who wants to make any of such proposals should send a detailed message describing his/her proposal to the address proposals@a4cp.org, with subject "ACP EC proposals: [a specific subject]".

April 1st, 2006 to June 30th, 2006

  • The ACP award for Reseach Excellence will be given every year. The EC devised a nomination procedure and the composition of the award committee, as follows:

    • Nomination procedure: any ACP member can nominate someone for this award, by sending a nomination ackage (a nomination form plus two reference forms). These forms can be downloaded from ttp://slash.math.unipd.it/acp/docs/2006-nomination.txt and http://slash.math.unipd.it/acp/docs/2006-reference.txt
    • Award committee: to select among the nominees, each year the Award committee will be formed by the resident and secretary of the EC, the last two award recipients, and the program chair of the CP conference where the award will be given. Members of the Award committee cannot be nominees, nor they can support a nomination by being a nominator or a reference. For year 2006, since we don't have two award receipients yet, the award ommittee will consist of the president, vice-president, and secretary of the EC, the 2005 award receipient, and the program chair of CP 2006.
    • For the 2006 Research Award, nominations have to be sent to award06@a4cp.org by July 7, 2006. An open call for nominations was disseminated by different channels. More details can be found at http://slash.math.unipd.it/acp/call-2006.htm
  • The following requests for sponsorship have been accepted:

  • The Application Task Force was launched, lead by Barry O'Sullivan. Its role will be to find suitable means for strengthening the links betweeen academia and industry in the CP community. An informal call for participation in the task force was disseminated by different channels. People interested in joining this task force should contact Barry O'Sullivan (b.osullivan@cs.ucc.ie).

  • The next ACP EC elections will take place soon. A call for candidates will be sent to the ACP mailing list and to the Yahoo CP group in the next few weeks.

July 1st to September 30th, 2006

  • 2006 ACP award for Research Excellence The 2006 ACP award for Research Excellence was given to Pascal Van Hentenryck. The decision was taken by unanimity by the award committee, composed of F. Benhamou, E. Freuder, P. Meseguer, F. Rossi, and M. Wallace. The award was presented during the CP 2006 conference in Nantes, where Pascal Van Hentenryck gave a very interesting presentation about his research achievements.

  • ACP EC elections For the 2006 ACP EC elections, the nominations were made in July. Nominated candidates were: Christian Schulte, Michael Trick, Jean-Charles Regin, Jimmy H.M. Lee, and Roland Yap. The elections, for four positions, were held until September 10. The elected new members of the ACP EC are: Christian Schulte, Michael Trick, Jean-Charles Regin, and Jimmy H.M. Lee. They will serve on the ACP EC for three years. More details about the elections (such as the number of voters and votes) can be found on the ACP web site (http://www.a4cp.org), where the new composition of the ACP EC can also be found.

  • CP 2006 CP 2006 was held in Nantes, France, on September 24-29, 2006. F. Benhamou and N. Jussien were very successful in organizing the conference. The conference had a record number of attendants (252) and a very innovative and well-received program. Besides standard workshops, tutorials, technical sessions, invited talks, and the doctoral program, two new ingredients of the program were:

    • A workshop on the next 10 years of CP as a rebound of the last ACM/DIMACS workshop on strategic directions of CP held in 1996. The workshop consisted of discussion tables, reports on the discussions, and panelist presentations. A written report on the main results of the workshop discussions is planned. The workshop was very lively and well attended.
    • CP tools. This was a one-day workshop with many participants (about 75) which focussed on existing CP solvers and the issues related to building them. The workshop consisted of tool presentations and invited talks.
  • CP 2008 call for bids A call for bids for CP 2008 will be sent out in the following days, with deadline end of December 2006.

  • 2007 CP summer school call for bids A call for bids for the 2007 CP summer school will be sent out in the following days, with deadline end of November 2006.

October 1st to December 31th, 2006

  • Appointment for all the EC charges. All the charges of the ACP (president, vice-president, secretary, treasurer and conference coordinator) were reconsidered.

    After an internal election process, with the following candidates:

    • President: Francesca Rossi, Jean-Charles Régin
    • Vice-president: Peter van Beek, Frédéric Benhamou
    • Secretary: Pedro Meseguer
    • Treasurer: Christian Bessiere
    • Conference coordinator: Barry O'Sullivan

    the following people were elected:

    • President: Francesca Rossi
    • Vice-president: Peter van Beek
    • Secretary: Pedro Meseguer
    • Treasurer: Christian Bessiere
    • Conference coordinator: Barry O'Sullivan

    These charges will be held for one year (until CP 2007).

  • Discussion on possible changes in the ACP rules. The EC is considering the possibility to improve some of the ACP rules. To do this, a subcommittee of the EC, chaired by Michael Trick, is analyzing many other associations and is discussing possible improvements of the current set of ACP rules. The whole ACP EC will then decide on the changes, which will apply within a year.

  • Feedback on Doctoral Program. A procedure has been activated to get feedback from students that have participated in the Doctoral Program of previous conferences. This information will be used to improve the structure of the DP in future CP conferences.

  • Decision for 2007 CP summer school. The call for bids for the CP 2007 summer school was sent out soon after CP 2006, and it has been closed on December 20. The ACP EC decided to accept the bid prepared by Javier Larrosa and Pedro Meseguer, who will organize the 2007 CP Summer School in Spain (in some place by the coast near Barcelona) in June 2007. It will be a general school, with lectures on various aspects of CP. More details will be posted soon.